This Cassandra beats her mythical namesake: people demonstrably listened to her, it’s just hard to remember what she sang. You’d have been forgiven for thinking the allocation of dance number ones at this point was working on something like a quota system: a slot needed to be filled, every twenty or so weeks, and some arcane quango had landed the job of deciding exactly which tracks would qualify. So “Dooms Night”, “Sandstorm”, “Kernkraft 400” all narrowly missed the top, and Rui Da Silva gets the nod. But really there’s no mystery as to how “Touch Me” got here – it was a clubland hit, and doomed attempts to clear a Spandau Ballet sample meant it had plenty of time to build demand such that 70,000-ish people nabbed it when it did finally get a wider release. The rest is simply luck, and a gap in the schedules.

“Touch Me” is a humdrum, overcast track, which threatens to build to something but then backs off into a noncommital house throb. Cassandra’s vocals are full-blooded but her melody is monotonous – her one-note drilling on “we can only understand what we are shown” is the weakest excuse for a hook we’ve met in a while. There’s more to like about Da Silva’s ominous backing, with the “Chant No.1” sample a ghost in the mix, though its presence wouldn’t suddenly have turned “Touch Me” into a classic. The video finds a crew of fetching urbanites crowding into a flat for a smeary, faintly druggy house party: just as this aspirational fun starts getting sexy, some sod heads up to the roof for a bit of fire poi. Appropriately disappointing for this false start of a record.

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http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/popular-00/#commentsSun, 26 Jul 2015 11:53:46 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29107Well, it took longer than I wanted, but we got there in the end: the 42 number ones of 2000, now reviewed and ready for your polling delectation. I give every number one a mark out of ten – here is where you can say what you’d have handed out. High scores this time from me included a 10 for Britney’s “Oops!” and 9s for Spiller and Black Coffee in a strong year. Which was also, by dint of the sheer number of hits, a weak year, with Mariah/Westlife and Five/Queen the double stinkers by my estimation. Over to you.
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Her career catalysed by her inclusion on “Stan”, Dido’s soft-spoken, ruminative pop became a familiar sound in early 00s Britain. On her second album, Life For Rent, she hit on a metaphor that cuts to the country’s quick, and obliquely hints why a stout claymation builder became the best-selling song of this over-stuffed year. “Life For Rent”, the song, takes the difference between renting and owning as its organising metaphor. “If my life is for rent,” Dido sings wistfully, “And I don’t learn to buy, I deserve nothing more than I get, cos nothing I have is truly mine”. Renting is provisionality, fear, the option of people who are just passing through, and whose opinion is too weak to count for much. Buying, on the other hand – now that’s commitment, maturity, the act of an adult.

More than an adult, a citizen. Bob the Builder was not the only such on TV. The screens of England in the 00s were full of property developers and home improvers, and they were us. Popular conservatism in the second half of the 20th century rested on the notion of the “property-owning democracy”, advanced by Anthony Eden and restated by Thatcher: the idea that private home ownership gave you a stake in the market economy. It was one of Thatcherism’s most seductive promises, and by the end of the century home-owners and their obsessions were a central part of British mass culture. But the emphasis had shifted – owning a house was no longer just a stake, it was a bet. One with generous odds and extravagant returns. If in 2000 Bob the Builder had built you a house in his home town of Bobsville – valued, naturally, at the UK average – then in seven years its value would have shot from £80,000 to £180,000. Stupefying inflation, and since real wages (or even fake ones) didn’t rise at remotely the same rate, it amounts to a one-off generational transfer of wealth to older homeowners that our economy and society is still reeling from. As the most popular Bob The Builder meme puts it, “Can We Fix It? No, It’s Fucked.”

Of course, Bob, like most 00s builders, didn’t do that much house-building. While his real-life counterparts busied themselves with conversions, regeneration projects, and the installation of square miles of decking, Bob’s jobs were cartoon economy staples – fixing a farmer’s fence so badgers couldn’t trample his crops, for instance. Bob is a benign figure, a mild-mannered, all-wise Dad to the eager, sometimes fractious machines in his charge. If he’s an avatar of Britain’s property mania, it’s no reflection on him as a character. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, kids’ culture is as sure a national barometer as you’ll find – it’s no accident that the hot new character find of 2000 is a builder.

The levels of his popularity seem startling now. Few current fandoms compare to Bobmania. Perhaps none do. This is the only million-seller of the year, the triumph of the new singles market that had pushed releases into supermarkets and Woolworths, where browsing parents would see them. And the single was just the tip of it. Bob toys sold out. Bob appearances sold out. Parents scrapped and four year olds trampled one another in stage invasions when Bob’s affable globular head wobbled into view. The cartoon became a kids’ TV classic, still in endless repeats (as well as new episodes) when I became a Dad myself. Neil Morrissey, playing Bob, became even richer.

Much of the enthusiasm was deserved. Bob The Builder is a well-crafted TV show with some excellent voice acting – especially from Rob Rackstraw, whose cackling, gulping Spud the Scarecrow is up with Zippy from Rainbow and Kenneth Williams’ Evil Edna as one of British childrens’ programming’s great comic voices. The machines are a colourful and entertaining cast, and well suited to the themes of friendship and effort each episode teases out. They are endlessly mechandisable, of course, but such is post-Teletubby reality, and Bob, unlike other cartoons, was restrained in the number of new characters it added to pump money out of the kids. Not everything is perfect: Wendy, Bob’s business partner, is hardly ever backed up by other good women characters, and rarely gets good stories of her own. For a flavour of Bob at his best, check out the 2003 Christmas special, A Christmas To Remember, where you’ll be treated not only to the standard Bobsville cast, but to an Elton John cameo, Chris Evans playing a rock star, and best of all, Noddy Holder guesting as the roadie, Banger.

The presence of rock stars (and Britpop boosters) hints at why “Can We Fix It?” exists and why it sounds like it does. Unlike the people at Ragdoll Productions, Neil Morrissey fancied himself a music fan, and felt a duty to make a song that might entertain adults as well as their kids. Or at least do their ears no great harm. “Can We Fix It?” is built around the cheery theme tune from the series, introducing the cast in a compact thirty seconds. To make it into a single, they toughen the music up, turning the song into a rudimentary kiddie-rock stomper. The entertaining video has Bob in a club, referencing blokey heroes of the British pop mainstream – Liam Gallagher is in there, who older kids might just about recognise, but also Madness, who they surely wouldn’t. The record keeps cartoon voices to a minimum – a missed opportunity if anything, as the show’s were good. It does its job with gusto and a knowledge of its own limitations. Neil Morrissey is no singer, and “Bob and the gang make a really good sound” is a statement of hope more than faith, but for kids, the record is chunky and satisfying with a call-and-response hook (“YES WE CAN!”) whose effectiveness has since been independently validated. Ten years on, I could play the video on an iphone to my children and they would chortle happily at the antics of Bob and the crew: an experience I’m quite happy to admit tilts my score a little higher.

It’s the sound of Britpop, long since moved out of Camden Town, settled down with a kid or two and considering a loft refurbishment once the shed’s been repaired. A happier ending than most of the ones we got in 1998, you might say. And it finishes off the year 2000, the decadent peak of Number One hitmaking, a year which switched between dazzling variety and baffling mediocrity week over week. Britain’s housing bubble is beginning its long rise; but its pop bubble is at maximum inflation. The foundations both were built on would have had Bob The Builder shaking his head and sucking air through his teeth.

“Stan” is a murder ballad. A song – not the first or last such Eminem recorded – about killing a woman. If this seems a strange way to look at it, it’s because the record takes pains to make its murder incidental. Its victim is nameless. We know Stan’s name. We know his brother, Matthew’s. We know Slim, the persona Stan is writing to, and we know Marshall Mathers, the man who replies. We even know a possible name for the child the murdered woman is carrying. We do not know her name. That isn’t where we’re supposed to be looking. The spotlight in the song is on the relationship between two men, star and fan. It’s how Stan would have wanted it.

Still, the murder is not incidental: it’s the climax of the record. All through the song, beautifully layered under the vocals, are background noises. They accompany Eminem’s conversational, half-spoken rapping and the unassuming, mid-tempo beat: literal scribbles in the margin of the track, encroaching thunder and rain. In the third verse, the rain is broken up by the wet swoosh of a car windscreen wiper, and, on cue, a woman screaming. Her death, and Stan’s, are what this track has been leading up to.

The presence of a dead woman in the song makes matters more dramatic, certainly. In some eyes, it might even ennoble proceedings. In a somewhat notorious – and slightly tongue-in-cheek – piece for the Guardian, critic Giles Foden poured praise on Eminem as a poet, specifically making a comparison to the “dark” and “ironic” poetry of Robert Browning. I remember studying Robert Browning in school – a teacher was big on the same poem Foden compares “Stan” to, “My Last Duchess”. It’s dark and ironic because, you see, we gradually realise the narrator killed his last duchess. Eminem and Browning, linked across time by brilliance, irony, bodies.

The screams, when they cut into the soundfield of verse three, are visceral, some of the most unpleasant sounds to appear on any number one. Yet at the same time they’re corny, a bit of gruesome theatre to appease any Slim Shady acolytes who’ve been getting wriggly wondering where the funny stuff is. They’re visceral, I thought at first, because they’re corny – ultimately decorative in just this way. A shot of casual sadism, a dollop of murder to make a psychological study just that bit more hardcore. (Or, with a nod to Foden, more prestigious).

But I realised the murder does more than that. Stan’s nameless girlfriend is a sacrifice the story makes. For what? To prevent “Stan” being a particular kind of tragedy. Imagine the song without the murder: it’s a tale of how art can fill empty lives but can’t always save them, tracking Stan through fandom and obsession and finally self-destruction. But, for all his obvious delusion, you’d never have to stop feeling sorry for the guy, whose sympathy Eminem is skilful enough to make sure you lose only gradually in any case. Without the murder, the centres of the song shift. One of them is the moment where Eminem speeds up Stan’s cadences when he describes cutting himself, the urgency and vividness of Stan’s letter spiking up towards a burst of stresses (”it’s like adRENalin the PAIN is such a SUDden RUSH to ME”). Another is the slurred rambling of Stan relating a half-recalled bullshit urban myth about Phil Collins as he drives himself to his death, the mis-remembered song title the most perfect and somehow heartbreaking touch in a song full of astonishing choices.

I have to think about the song that is, not the one that isn’t, and the central narrative choice – the woman’s murder. It stops Stan being a tragic figure; turns him contemptible, an everyday monster. Why is it so important he becomes that? Partly it’s because the collapse in our sympathy for Stan means we might not lose too much sympathy for Marshall Mathers, the reasonable, reply-writing narrator of the fourth verse. Here’s where there’s some real old school irony, if you want it – Eminem’s carefully manicured, offhand, self-portrait as a busy but generous star, befuddled by but polite and helpful to his obsessive fans.

If listeners sympathised with Stan, Eminem’s dismissal of his self-harm – “I say that shit just clowning dog, how fucked up is you?” – would stand revealed as callous. But because we know Stan really is fucked-up, fucked-up enough to kill someone, Eminem has a shot at seeming wise. The same goes throughout his response. We know Stan is a monster, and because of that the song can treat his obsession as monstrous – most famously, the “we should be together, too” kiss-off line of the second verse, which, because the guy turns out to be a psycho, gives “Stan” a gay-panic overtone Eminem got called out on.

Often in stories, writers use a woman’s casual death as a spur to build the hero’s character. Here, it’s a device that makes clear who the hero isn’t, absolves Eminem by revealing Stan as just another murderous guy. Absolves him of what, though?

To answer that we have to remember how chippy and defensive “The Real Slim Shady” was behind its bonhomie, how keen Eminem was to promote himself as both a scourge of pop culture and a man besieged, with everyone from “feminist women” to Christina Aguilera trash-talking him, trying to pull him down. At the centre of the criticism was his misogyny and homophobia, the impact on his young fans of songs like the venomous “Kim” or “Bonnie & Clyde 97”, where the trunk murder motif first showed up. “Stan” is born from those traits too. But it’s also just as much a creature of its battling context as “Real Slim Shady” was. A key line – hidden in mid-rant, slurred mockingly by the drunk, desperate Stan – is “see Slim, I ain’t like you”. It’s more heavy irony – Stan has finally become exactly like Slim. But it’s only Slim he’s like – who never could have replied, because he’s not real. If “The Real Slim Shady” was Eminem trolling his critics, “Stan” comes on as him taking them in absolute earnest. He imagines their worst nightmare, the fan so deranged he actually does imitate Slim Shady. He plays the scenario out to its inevitable, horrible end, and then turns to camera and says, look, if anyone did this, it’s because they’re a psycho.

That’s Eminem’s point, one you might recognise from the weary defenses popular culture has to mount, time and again, against its censors. No, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t cause violence. No, heavy metal doesn’t cause suicide. No, Slim Shady isn’t an accessory to murder – Eminem getting his arguments in here before the media can find a real-life case to pin on him. It’s a familiar defense because it’s right. But long before “Stan” was released, a more nuanced criticism grew up alongside these simple-minded parades of direct cause and direct effect. Cultural influence isn’t the thunder and lightning, its the rain, falling steadily, eroding and altering things so gradually. “Stan” is a narrative, made up of authorial choices: one of those choices is to kill a woman to make a point about the men in its story. And as women were pointing out long before “Stan”, the rain of female bodies in so many stories, treated so incidentally, makes normal an idea that they are props, adjuncts to the story of a man. Just as his girlfriend is to Stan, whose motive may be unlikely, but whose crime is all too familiar.

“Stan” ends on a pratfall – Eminem’s “it was – damn!” which tilts the whole track into being a dark shaggy dog story or cautionary tale, if that’s how you want to take it. While he might have been surprised how the song took off, it’s obviously no throwaway. He takes immense care over the performance and its bravura execution. It’s undeniably a hip-hop track, and the hip-hop community picked up on it, taking “stan” into the language as a dismissive marker for fans committed beyond reason. But it also doesn’t sound very much like hip-hop. The tether of Eminem’s flow to the beat is gossamer; he’s using his skills as a rapper but never so you notice he’s rapping. The ancestry of “Stan” includes much rap storytelling but also older country and pop spoken novelties – cornball yarns like Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear”, and the death stories so popular in the 70s. Eminem’s skill lets him be far subtler, of course. The epistolary mode – first time at number one since 1966! – means we don’t need a unifying narrator to dilute the psychodrama, and his mastery of internal rhymes lets Eminem keep control of the rhythm while hardly ever drawing attention to it. I don’t particularly enjoy listening to “Stan” – the final verses are a little too cynical and voyeuristic for me. But every time I do play it I hear something else in Eminem’s performance. In execution, it’s peerless: no other record does what this does.

That performance – and the novelty – quickly made “Stan” Eminem’s most famous track. But it goes deeper, too. The relationship between star and fan has been the centre of pop for decades. It’s the dream of becoming someone else, and maybe becoming yourself through that. An inherently chancy process. Still, anyone from Bowie to Madonna, from Presley to Gary Barlow, might have told the story of their number one fan, and with dozens of different outcomes, most less cruel than “Stan”. Eminem’s fortune is to find that story at the start of a time when the barriers between everyone are thinning – where almost anyone might have an uncomfortable fan, an obsessive enemy, an awkward request or confession landing in their laps at any time. No wonder a song which explores, verse by verse, how much identificaton is too much can still sound uncomfortable.

We are all sometimes Marshall Mathers now? Maybe, but we are just as likely to be Stan, not the murderous Stan but the Stan who has a shitty day and drifts away and puts songs on. Marshall was that guy too, which is why those verses sound human, not just ominous – why “Stan”, like the best ballads, is a song you can hear and hope maybe this time it’ll turn out better. It’s important to Eminem that he dash our sympathies for Stan, but it’s important that not all the song’s tenderness be wrecked alongside them. Which is where the second woman in “Stan” comes in.

Dido’s refrain, threaded through the song like a flyleaf between each chapter, was the first most listeners – to Eminem or anyone – heard of her. It’s sweetly sung, but with a slight reserve, a disengagement from the cold-tea despond of life she’s describing. Her detachment is designed to resolve, in the chorus of “Thank You”, into gratitude: a stock songwriting contrast, not too far in tone from All Saints’ “Black Coffee”. In “Stan”, of course, that chance of resolution is cut off. The only source of release is the picture on the wall, and the cycle begins again. Even though Dido’s voice is a lull and her interludes narcotic, her “not so bad” is the portion given to hope in this bleakest of great hit records. It’s not much. The endless drizzle, the numbed delicacy, and that glimpse of imaginary empathy – these are what precede, and survive, Stan and his girlfriend’s catastrophe. The same anomie, and the same rain, introduce Marshall’s reply as introduced Stan’s first letter. What was accomplished? Nothing.

“Never Had A Dream Come True” is enjoyably drippy, but does nothing to shake my sense that S Club 7 are the blandest proposition of this pop era. Like their other early records, it’s aimed at kids, and it feels aimed at kids: a Fisher-Price heartbreak set, a ballad which is as much a teaching aid for what ballads are like as a track in its own right. It doesn’t do its job at all badly, though. It fills the mulled December ballad gap the Spice Girls left behind, and the decision to drop the band element and give the whole track to Jo O’Meara works, gives the heartache a consistency and intensity the song probably wasn’t strong enough to sustain with a group vocal. There’s an air of innocent sincerity to this despite its functional TV show origins, one that lets it get away with its purely textbook sentiment. It’s an ordinary song done as well as it could have been.

Its lack of features makes “Never Had” a good moment to talk about its plush sponsor, Pudsey Bear, and the BBC’s annual Children In Need telethon. Like the BBC that runs it, Children in Need is an umbrella organisation, essentially redistributive, where eye-catching children’s causes that could probably manage without its support are used to raise skiploads of money; money that can also be funneled to smaller, less photogenic, just as worthy projects. Also like the BBC, Children in Need is respected in its profession and more generally loved by the public. It’s been running since 1980, bear mascot and all, a fixed point in the Autumn schedules. Of course, it didn’t take long to dabble in charity singles.

But unlike Comic Relief, which has scored a bullseye – sometimes two – nearly every year it’s run since 1995, Children In Need’s hitmaking record has a fascinating trace of BBC inefficiency. The year Comic Relief was starting its run, with 1995’s “Love Can Build A Bridge”, Children In Need put forward the number sixty smash “You Better Believe It (Children In Need)” by Patsy Palmer and Sid Owen. It’s not flopped quite as poorly since, though it has a potent record of picking artists just past their peak, backing unloved reunions (”Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)” bore its brand), and few charity records are as dumbfounding as Gary Barlow teaming up with a pop-grime package tour line-up for a version of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”. Only the BBC – and Children In Need – would greenlight that. It struggled to #24.

The nature of Popular is that we’ll meet the times Children In Need get it right, which are mostly less interesting. “Never Had A Dream Come True” is probably the best of them, glutinous in spots – that bloody stardust effect again – but reputable, easy to imagine kids buying and liking in its own right. Hard to object to. Except that, inevitably in a market defined by a tight turnover of release dates – this kind of TV tie-in pop could gradually begin to eat up the chart calendar. First Comic Relief, then Children In Need – why not other charitable moments? And if a charity TV show can get a hit more or less to order, why couldn’t a commercial one? The reality TV era – which would eventually give O’Meara enough rope to end her dreams for good – was well underway by now onscreen, and looms ahead of us on Popular. It would part viewers from money in ways that made telethons seem herbivorous, and the charts would be fully implicated.

It’s hard not to let what Beyoncé Knowles was become swamped by what she is. A veteran, an icon, a woman enjoying a remarkable critical peak, an earner, second only to headphone mogul Dr Dre on current musical money lists – Beyoncé, as she is happy to tell us, works astonishingly hard, but one of the things she works at is controlling her narrative, shaping her career so that each step seems higher than the last, and her success appears pre-ordained. It was there in the name of her own group. “Child of destiny… independent me…”. But that’s only a story. Nothing is really inevitable, and Beyoncé enters Popular running, working, managing her options, using her group’s remarkable success as a springboard, while trying to win a PR battle over the palace coup that finished a multi-platinum line-up and cut a quartet to a reshuffled trio.

The stakes were very high. The Writings On The Wall sold millions and helped reinvent its genre. In sound and attitude, the singles from it were astonishing, particularly “Bills Bills Bills” and “Say My Name”, which would glide, jab, purr, stutter, break down into precise micro-maps of beatwork and then be reconstituted in time for their earworm choruses. The group themselves were a match for their production, just as happy to change modes mid-song. Or even mid chorus – take the way “Bills Bills Bills” jumps from the sweeping repetition of “bills….bills…bills…” to the sudden, sprightly kiss-off of “I don’t think you do / So you and me are through”. On “Say My Name” the angry stacatto of the verses, and their rushes of paranoid realisation, complement the keening, screw-turning chorus: it’s a masterpiece of suspicion and wrath, playing off the great history of those emotions in soul music while sounding like nothing before.

But the group who made those songs was gone. LaTavia Roberson and LaToya Luckett complained about the management and found themselves discarded mid-video. By “Independent Women”, one of their replacements had already quit. Destiny’s Child was now a trio. That would be its final and platonic form, its megastar incarnation, one that still reforms now and then. Luckett and Roberson became the Sutcliffe and Best of the group, banished from Destiny’s Child before things really got big – or so the new story framed it, and never mind that no subsequent album actually sold as much as The Writings On The Wall:

Big was certainly the plan. Survivor - the album – is a soggy thing in parts, but it announced itself with unparalleled clarity and determination: three singles, three manifestos. “Independent Women, Part 1” was the first, with the most to prove. Right away, it’s clear something has changed. The switches and feints of “Bills Bills Bills” or “Say My Name” are replaced by a far more direct approach, a straight-to-the-point funk loop that bumps away all through the song, a framework to showcase its three singers. The aftershock of the new lingers – this record may streamline and back off from earlier advances, but it still sounds thrilling and self-possessed, confidently honing its approach while everyone else catches up. But there’s no question anymore of the production becoming the star. Whether or not ‘futurism’ was ever the point of Destiny’s Child, it isn’t here.

The group’s lyrical approach has also hardened. The 1998-9 singles were vignettes: little bullet-time panoramas circling a particular interpersonal crisis just at the moment of collapse. “Independent Women” throws out that approach and again prefers something that pulls your focus onto the singer: a song built around a rhetorical device, the snapped “Question” at the start of every line. It’s remorselessly direct: economic and sexual independence were always in the music, the subtext of “Bills Bills Bills” or “Jumpin’ Jumpin’”, but there’s zero room for subtext here. The new Destinys’ Child is ruthlessly on the nose.

So whether we want to be anachronistic or not, there’s no escaping it: everything’s pointing in the same directon. The music toned down, more a framework for its singers. The lyrics turned into a rhetorical barrage, keeping the focus squarely on who’s delivering them, not their situation. And the basic mathematics of the new group. There’s no centre to four (or at most – this was Roberson and Luckett’s complaint – a double centre), but three resolves into a natural shape on stage and on film, a V formation. Just ask Mary Wilson and Flo Ballard. While the spotlight in Destinys Child sometimes rotates – and Kelly Rowland’s glorious, camera-pleasing repertoire of smirks, side-eyes and reaction shots is the group’s secret video weapon – this incarnation of the band is a machine built to make a singer famous.

Before it can do that, there was a film to promote. “Independent Women” tackles its job as a soundtrack single for Charlie’s Angels as directly as it tackles everything else. Beyoncé isn’t just sharing the spotlight with her co-Childs, but with three other women – Lucy Liu, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz – who get individual shout-outs alongside constant lyrical nods to the film. This is a hostage to fortune, you might think – Charlie’s Angels was a sharp, fun movie, one I remember with only fondness, but “Independent Women Part 1” is a landmark record by one of the major 00s pop groups. There’s certainly a risk the constant product placement might diminish it now.

I think it dodges that risk. Partly it’s that within the economic game the record uses to define independence, showing off your soundtrack deal is plainly a legit move. Partly it’s the thematic tie – Charlie’s Angels is a vision (or fantasy) of a Hollywood where women get to front action films, and the line between the record made to promote the movie and the record Destiny’s Child would be making anyway is almost invisible. (”Synergy”, as the memos no doubt put it.) Mostly it’s just that the record is so forceful a celebration that it brushes caveats aside.

Because while it’s easy to see Destiny’s Child’s new directness in terms of what’s been lost, this is pop, and there’s an advantage to making the obvious unavoidable, going all-out for the anthemic. The context the group operated in wasn’t just their earlier singles, it was a trend within R&B of probing power-games and inequalities in relationships: TLC’s flaying of impecunious suitors on “No Scrubs” just the most prominent example. By September 2000, when “Independent Women” came out, Billboard could refer offhanded to “a wave of male-bashing sweeping R&B”. If they didn’t have the no-nonsense stringency of Destiny’s Child’s ‘98-’99 singles in mind, others were happy to lump the group in. The concern was overstated: rock and pop songs had been about women, money and sex since forever. The only twist was now the women had – on record, at least – control of the money and the sex. But the trend was real enough. “Independent Women, Part 1” doubled down on it by presenting the underlying theme as starkly as possible.

That meant cash: if you’re going to do a song about independence, you aim for what keeps people dependent. “Independent Women, Part 1” is as clear sighted about the transactional side of relationships as any Gang Of Four song – the difference being that the critique is pragmatic not systemic. The solution to inequality is to earn enough to afford what you want yourself. Here’s where the song’s focus, its musical and lyrical bluntness, pays off – the successive “I bought it… I bought it… I bought it…” is a stirring application of force. And then the record plays its best trick, taking the latent churchiness within the preaching, rhetorical style and unleashing it for the chorus, turning individual autonomy into a communal celebration – “throw your hands up at me!”. It’s not solidarity, exactly – no room for those who can’t or won’t earn. But in that moment, “Independent Women, Part 1” – the anthem, the film promo, the comeback, the crest of a trend, the next step in a business plan – lives the dream of the virtuous market, where all interests perfectly align.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/destinys-child-independent-women-part-1/feed/71New Popular Entries: Where And When?http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/06/new-popular-entries-where-and-when/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/06/new-popular-entries-where-and-when/#commentsSun, 28 Jun 2015 21:35:48 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29038Hello – just a quick note to reassure people that we haven’t gone back to the bad old days of no updates. My situation is as follows – I’ve been on a long, complicated work project which finishes tomorrow. Then on Tuesday I’m going into hospital to have my gall bladder taken out – if all goes well I’ll be out on Tuesday night and will be recuperating for a week or two. At some point during that I’ll start updating Popular regularly again!

(The next entry is actually half written – if I manage to finish it I’ll put that up, as it offers a bit more discursive meat than poor LeAnn.)

Meanwhile, this is an excellent opportunity to go check out the masses of new recent posts on Marcello and Lena’s Then Play Long blog, which has surged back into activity with some superb writing on the LPs of 1989.

“Same Old Brand New You” showed that the Max Martin style could be achieved on the cheap – but what happened if you went in the other direction? Plasticky British pop wasn’t the only strain under pressure from the Swedes – America’s pop establishment, typified by ballad queen Diane Warren, also needed to react. “Can’t Fight The Moonlight”, co-written by Warren, is one attempt. It’s an expansive meeting of styles – a sweeping film soundtrack number, produced with thumping, Martin-esque drama. Just in case that wasn’t big enough, the producer is Trevor Horn, obviously no stranger to maximalist visions for pop. Somewhere in this colossal landscape is LeAnn Rimes, a young country-to-pop crossover act who seemed more comfortable at the faith and flag end of her original genre.

Can it possibly hang together? Can Warren’s, Horn’s, Rimes’ and (in spirit) Martin’s contributions align? From its first chord – distorted, almost grungy, but enormous – “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” sounds overstuffed, like “Oops…I Did It Again” on growth hormones. Martin’s songwriting trick at this point – simple, but immensely successful – was to introduce ideas and bring them gradually together, so that his hits come in with relative understatement and go out with a mighty collision of overlapping hooks. “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” starts big and finds itself with nowhere much larger to go, reliant on ever more pop-eyed yawling from LeAnn Rimes. Luckily the song, especially that confident chorus, is strong enough to just about carry this weight.

But the production doesn’t really work for it. “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” is, in its bones, Tin Pan Alley songwriting, a romantic metaphor with a lyric hung around it. It’s flirtatious, a world and a tradition away from the feverish interiority of Britney’s hits, say. And the metaphor is one of fate – events are beyond the control of Rimes’ intended; it’s the bewitching power of the moonlight – of traditional romance – that’s making the running. But the staging of the song as a display of overwhelming strength is giving the moonlight one hell of a push. Horn’s thunderous production, and Rimes’ hulked-out twang, suggest not so much drawing down the moon as threatening to physically smash it into the Earth. The Martin style runs into its limits. It can excite, but it can also exhaust.

A1’s “Take On Me” was a needless re-spray of the prior generation’s classic pop. Now their magpie tendency turns to their own times. After Billie’s “Day And Night”, this is the year’s second I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Cheiron number one, a studied and whole-hearted application of the uptempo Swedish style to an English boyband. “Same Old Brand New You” makes no secret of the moves it’s learned from its sources, and adds only the lightest of new twists in the form of a body-rockin’ electro breakdown.

It ought to be as cheap and dismissable as “Stomp”. But somehow it’s not – “Same Old Brand New You” is a minor gem, a song that never fails to sweep me up with it, and the best boyband track since Five’s “Keep On Movin’” at least. It’s not an especially complex song – it has no hidden twists or musical surprises. It does have a big, satisfying faux-Max chorus that it builds itself around very effectively – everything in the track teasing and cranking up towards the dramatic “gone, gone, gone” refrain that ignites the chorus hook. And it’s a boyband performance that makes excellent use of its modest resources. The autocue vocal readings that spoiled “Take On Me” are replaced with a song that splits and rejoins its four slightly wheedling voices with real panache: the nervy defiance of the “same old line / one more time” sections, for instance.

That doesn’t fully explain why this works, though. Compare America’s boybands, and their real-Max uses of the bombastic, percussive-chord style: “Larger Than Life”, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”, “It’s Gonna Be Me”. They’re all about self-assertion, the Cheiron style as a young man’s confident swagger. Those boys do get vulnerable, of course, but they do it ballad style. A1’s song is different. The boys are on the losing side in this relationship, confused and left reeling by a woman’s caprices. “If you don’t wanna find me gone, gone, gone, gone, gone!” they sing, but the way their voices corkscrew around the word, spiralling down into the chorus, you know there’s no hope of them making good on that threat, of escaping the torment.

A1 succeed, in other words, not because they’re trying to be Swedish, but because they’re trying to be Britney – the abject, melodramatic Britney of “You Drive Me (Crazy)”. It’s a good look for them. An idea presents itself: British boybands often spark most to life when they have to act like losers – when their borrowed moves and practiced lines won’t be enough, and desperation pokes its way through. Westlife – who never expose themselves like this, even when their songs offer a chance of it – often remind me of the 1950s and 1960s in the worst way. But there’s something about “Same Old” that recalls Joe Meek and the wounded urgency of his productions for the Honeycombs and John Leyton. For all its counterfeit modern finery, “Same Old Brand New You” lives by the same thing groups like A1 have lived or died by since the sixties at least: the unselfish conviction they can bring to their lies, pleas and promises when cornered.

“My Love” is Westlife in their pomp – a seventh straight number one, leaving records trailing. They were as popular as they’d ever been, which is to say, not as popular as you might think: a steady fanbase of a hundred thousand or so first week fans, but nothing in the way of crossover. Still, they sounded monolithic enough. “My Love” starts intriguingly hesitant, as if it wants to be their “Knowing Me Knowing You” – “I’m all alone, the rooms are getting smaller” (Imagine Westlife, trapped in a malfunctioning TARDIS.) Of course, that doesn’t last, and the windswept chorus of “My Love” – a de facto title track for their second album, Coast To Coast – is them at their most banner-waving. It’s confident and assured, big-chested – they know what they’re about by now, these boys. Cheiron – the jobbing end of Cheiron – are back too. A memo is sent out to stakeholders: the Westlife enterprise has considered the possibility of changing its business model for the second record, and politely rejected the proposal.

Still, change has a way of creeping up on you. The next Westlife single is the first I don’t have to write about – no, I haven’t checked what I’m missing – and so “My Love” is the first possible ending for their Imperial Phase. It almost sounds like hubris, even, though ultimately Westlife are too pleasant a thing for that. We’re halfway through. Their first seven number ones spanned eighteen months; their next seven take seventy-two. It’s a long, slow road down. And if you were to leave one Westlife single to future generations, a monument to their stolid, turn-waiting dominance, it might as well be “My Love”. The song has their strengths – they knew how to build a basic, sturdy emotional arc across a track, and how to layer on those thick-set harmonies in support of it. And in its weakness for a smarmy resolution, and its unwillingness to push its opening feelings, it has their failure to build on even that mild potential.

The original concept for the third Spice Girls album – according to Stannard and Rowe, the writers and producers the group jilted for Forever – was that it would concern the girls becoming women, the group maturing along with their audience. Even ignoring the fact that these “girls” were already the five most successful women in British music and sticking purely to the branding, It wasn’t the most promising of ideas. Sure, a lot of the charm and quality of Spice was how unapologetic it was in drawing inspiration from teen magazine problem pages – balancing friends and boys; safe sex; being nice to your Mum. It might have aimed itself squarely at a particular market, but it didn’t talk down to them – and in not doing so, it won a far huger audience. But Spiceworld had already moved away from that, and besides, there were plenty of grown-up alternatives out there. The Spice Girls never making anything like “Black Coffee” was no shame: forcing themselves to try might have been.

In the event, Geri went, and the sessions were scrapped – she was the group’s most enthusiastic conceptualist anyway. The corny idea – and faint desperation – of the girls-become-women notion does underline, though, what a difficult position the rest of the group were in. They were still a success – their 1998 World Tour had been a sell-out – but the pop transformation they’d helped set in motion was moving with startling speed. When Spiceworld was released, the wave of Spice successors was only beginning to break: “Spice Up Your Life!” predated B*Witched, Billie, and All Saints’ number ones. In the three year gap between it and “Holler”, those bands had not only flourished, but largely vanished. British pop was a boys’ game again, and in America, the girls were the solo ex-Disney stars, with their rather un-Spicely angst. Or they were R&B groups – more futuristic and more polished than the Spicers’ brash cheek had ever allowed for. The Spice model of the group – a cartoon gang of pals, with one broad personality trait apiece – had been holed by Geri’s departure: now it was sinking.

Ultimately, it would have taken an astonishing tactician and brilliant songs to have led the Spice Girls through the changed pop landscape and have them emerge anywhere near its top. The group had neither. They had four tired women whose minds were half on their solo careers, and they had Darkchild, aka Rodney Jerkins, aka the producer of “Say My Name”, aka the first male vocalist on a Spice Girls track. Saying his name, as it happened, and the group’s name, and the track’s – and date-stamping it for good measure. Like “Holler” needed to sound any more 2000.

By now we knew a bit about the Girls’ individual tastes and instincts. Emma and Victoria had made dance music – rather more startling than “Holler”, in the latter case. Mel B had made plenty of R&B attempts. Mel C had at least dabbled in it, but she’d dabbled in everything, and her voice sounds most subdued and least at ease on this single. Still, a move into modernist R&B shouldn’t have come as a shock, or felt like a disappointment. And Jerkins as a producer had more than enough pedigree for the job – as well as the swiss-watch engineering of “Say My Name”, he’d helmed Brandy and Monica’s delightfully dramatic “The Boy Is Mine” and Whitney Houston’s icy comeback, “It’s Not Right But It’s OK”. He had a flair for songs, and vocals, built around emotional pressure, and strong women holding up under it. There should have been room for a great collaboration.

But Jerkins is also an inconsistent producer – scan his list of hits and there’s a fair bit of drizzle among the flashes of lighting. “Holler” shifts and shuffles in a competent, modish way but he’s not trying to change any games. Nor, to be fair, are the singers. The first question for any Spice Girl co-writer or producer should be how you accomodate four (or five) very different voices, and give the sense that this is a group, not just women passing a mic around. The early singles managed it impeccably – even “Spice Up Your Life!” brazened it through. On, “Holler”, a few background coos aside, there’s none of that feeling. “Holler” is no disaster, it’s just an okay R&B single with sub-par vocalists. The track bumps politely to its end: there’s the feeling of a duty having been done, but no remaining chemistry or spark.

The audible “will this do?” of “Holler” at least gets the answer “yeah”, which is more than I could say for “Let Love Lead The Way”, the group’s return to the soft psychological slowie mode of “Mama” or “Goodbye”. It’s feeble – there was a grain of the specific in “Viva Forever”, “2 Become 1” or any of the earlier Spice ballads that gave the songs life. “Let Love” is pillowy and puffed-up, the group – their vocal weakness as obvious as it’s ever been – dealing with big, airy questions in winsome fashion: “Why is there joy? Why is there pain? Why is there sunshine and the rain?”. You can safely bet that whatever the answers to these profound questions, they won’t be found on the forgotten half of a footnote hit by a knackered band that sounds like it can’t even work out why it exists. The song offers its own, depressing response: “No matter what, we must go on.” The Spice Girls made two fine number ones that could have ended their era. Here, finally, it’s ended for them.

A visit to budget supermarket Aldi is a pop semiotician’s delight. The shelves are lined with Aldi’s own versions of name brands, all designed to trick – or reassure – the mind that what you’re buying is almost the authentic one, or at least so close in look as to be close in quality. The game is always to create packs that feel as near to the model brand as possible without actually drawing down any lawyerly wrath.

At Asda, for instance – where name brands sit alongside the store ones – the own-label version of Coco Pops is called Choco Snaps and features a bemused bear, not a cheeky monkey, and a large black banner with the supermarket logo. Aldi has no such modesty: its Choco Rice comes in the bright yellow livery of Kelloggs’ and has a monkey of its own. Working as Aldi’s designers must be an entertaining job, with a measure of critical analysis required to negotiate the gap between the identifiable parts of a brand and the legally defensible ones.

And here we are at Steps’ “Stomp”, a song whose guts and foundation is Chic’s “Everybody Dance”, whose chorus is about everybody dancing, whose CD single – according to Discogs – carries the note “A Tribute To Nile Rodgers And Bernard Edwards”… and yet it isn’t “Everybody Dance”. And the “tribute” is of the kind that doesn’t involve writing credits. “Stomp” is the Aldi Choco Rice of pop, a song that is trying as hard as possible to be another song while making certain it doesn’t get there. “Would my honourable friend please acknowledge that clapping is a movement of the hands, whereas to stomp is a motion of the feet? The songs are clearly quite different.”

If you sit down to a bowl of Choco Rice, you’re still going to get a faceful of sugary cereal with doubtful nutritional value. And “Stomp”, while it’s playing, carries off its Chic impression with good-natured gusto. Steps were often cheap and often cheerful, and if those weren’t their very best qualities it’s fair enough that they landed the group at Number One twice. Even so “Stomp” is a strange record, very easy to ignore, its careful tinkering with a familiar classic somehow ending up as even more unnecessary than one of the era’s rash of cover versions. Other hits of 2000 explored disco as a space for drama and possibility: “Stomp” is closer to the majority experience of disco as it likely was – colourful, happy, tacky and forgettable.

A theological detour. The rise of New Atheism – Dawkins et al. – seems to have made it somewhat infra dig for lifelong unbelievers like me to admit there are things we respect and admire about religions and the religious. But of course there are. For instance, one of the things I find most admirable – perhaps I just mean enviable – when I meet it in Christians is the sense of faith as a reserve of redemptive strength. The feeling that, no matter how bad things are, no matter how bad you are, Jesus loves you. The fact I don’t believe in him doesn’t invalidate the testimony of millions who have found this kind of grace when they needed it – any more than their belief invalidates the experience of those who reached for it and could not find it. I believe what they’re taking is a placebo; they believe it’s the real thing. Whoever’s right, they get a chance at the benefit, and I don’t.

Or don’t I? That kind of feeling saturates “Beautiful Day” – one of U2’s most obviously Christian singles, full of grace and floods and doves and no-room-at-the-inn. And I feel this song well enough. I think it’s the most honest and moving record Bono and the crew have landed at Number One – the one where the reliquaries of rock’n’roll and the baggage of experiment are jettisoned, and Bono sings a big, slick modern rock song about faith. Sings it well and cleverly, too – the quiet, beaten-down tone of the opening verse, that halting gap on “lend – a hand”, the breakdown into gutterals on some of the closing chorus lines; these things dramatise the idea of a man on his last chance. “Reach me – I know I’m not a hopeless case”, he pleads: there’s a need I can relate to sometimes. You don’t need to feel God is your judge to understand the urge for redemption. Irony abounds, of course – Bono’s performance here rests on him selling the idea of himself as a man of great humility. But sell it he does.

U2 are Christians, not Christian Rockers (though, like indie, that’s a genre defined by distribution and audience more than content). They are careful to make sure “Beautiful Day” is also about a lover, or a shitty week, or anything a worldwide audience wants to make it about. But I hear religion in the song’s bones. And in any case, religiosity is rarely far from the surface of stadium rock. I once wrote a piece for Pitchfork about rock music as “secular gospel” – something that harnessed the sense of yearning, awe, and the numinous in religion and translated it into a folk idiom, like soul music slyly borrowed the tactics and techniques of Church music to sing about earthly desire.

But these strategies come with a price. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in ghosts – that when you borrow from the spiritual, other inevitable associations might make the journey and haunt the music. So soul music drew on gospel to describe love and lust, and often became, at its strongest, a music about sin and the terror of judgement. Rock music harnessed the scale and awe of religion, and brought upon itself the imp of reformation – the itch to purify, refocus, be born again. In the 80s, on a song like “Bad”, U2 took a track’s length to build up a questing, burning fervor. On “Beautiful Day”, that big, stadium sized music is out of reach at the start of the song – it flares for the chorus, but dies: they have to earn it back.

Perhaps, after the exhausting – and exhausted – mess of Pop and its tour, humility came easier. U2 needed that purification themselves – though you could argue they’ve never moved significantly on since. Bono apparently objected to The Edge’s guitar tone – too retro, too close to the band’s new wave roots. But “Beautiful Day” isn’t, and isn’t trying to be, the kind of spontaneous small-band performance The Edge’s move might indicate. From its glimmering keyboards to its slightly arid drum sounds, this is as meticulously crafted and fretted over as anything on their 90s records, it’s just ended up somewhere more straightforward. It takes smaller bets than Zooropa or Pop, and they pay off: the sudden cut-ins of backing vocals on the chorus (and bits of the verses) are a good, effective example, giving a sense of the singer shored painfully up as he contemplates his life. “Beautiful Day” is a success, but U2 have become what – for better and for worse – they never used to be: a band that knows what they’re good at.

The biggest risk “Beautiful Day” takes is its sudden expansion of scale in the middle eight – “see China right in front of you”, and so on, accompanied by a ripple of William Orbit style keyboard. It shows its protagonist all the kingdoms of the earth – OK, the song isn’t all humble – not as temptation, but as a reach towards a more redemptive view, one that acknowledges the problems and error of the world but wants to love it anyway. Whether this planetary point of view is global or simply globalised – the airy take of a jet-setter with the ear of the mighty – it’s the emotional crux of the song, the turning point at which the singer shrugs off his own narrow troubles and gets that shot at redemption. If it works, the rest of “Beautiful Day” falls into place. And, for all my grudges about the man and his band, it does work. It earns the urgency of the coda – “if you don’t know you can feel it somehow”, a singer willing himself back to stardom. I am no closer, I think, to believing in God. But for a few minutes here, I can manage something quite as unlikely: I can believe in Bono.

All Saints’ final number one is their most oblique, their most grown-up, also their finest. The song barely glances at its title – a pair of words out of a hundred in the lyric – but the whole record is a glance or a quiet smile, a celebration of tiny satisfactions, and of finding yourself with someone who conjures them so easily. “Each moment is cool / freeze the moment”. It’s a song, most of it, about feeling contented – a rare subject for pop, which prefers to nose out conflict (the video finds some anyway, staging “Black Coffee” as a post-Matrix bullet time break-up drama). There are songs – cousins to this, like “I Say A Little Prayer” – that capture the way love makes the everyday blush with significance, but “Black Coffee” is after something more comfortable. A day with your lover, as casually sweet as all the other ones. Nothing’s perfect, but “Black Coffee”’s rippling, overlapping melody lines make even the quarrels sound blissful.

It’s a lovely record, two late 90s takes on pop meshing and peaking: All Saints’ idea of a British female harmony group, and William Orbit’s gorgeous dissolve of pop into ambient bubbles and flows. (Both now disappear: All Saints split, to largely unsuccessful ends; Orbit, jilted by his primary collaborator, stepped back from the charts.) The combination, as on “Pure Shores”, is irresistibly of its time: unlike that record, “Black Coffee” isn’t pure escapism. Around the edges of this playful song snaps another, one with a harder bite. The opening and breakdown of “Black Coffee” – crunching drums, radar synths – is like a more unforgiving world which our couple spend the mid-song cocooning themselves away from.

The snap and turn of those opening beats makes me think of catwalk photography; the video feels more like a magazine shoot than a relationship. Probably more than anyone since the early 80s, All Saints were a band who felt like they belonged in fashion, a style press imagining of what pop could be like. They always looked the part, but often the music strained too hard to live up to its references. Finally, with the Orbit collaborations, they got there, and “Black Coffee” is the greatest realisation of the All Saints concept – their most perfectly glossy exterior, and only warmth inside.

I don’t know if “Against All Odds” is the best Phil Collins song. I suspect it is. But it’s certainly the most Phil Collins song, the complete conjunction of things you might associate with Phil Collins: song-shifting drum breakdowns, male pattern agony, everybloke blues. It’s also a song that attracts covers: writing about one of them on NYLPM, I said: “The ur-version of “Against All Odds” will always be by a drunk divorced man in a suburban karaoke, singing his desperate heart away – Phil’s original is just a guide vocal.”

The song gets its power from its poker-game tension between lyric and arrangement. As the words get more hopeless, the music raises its stake in the other direction, increasing the defiance and bombast. The worse this guy’s prospects look, the more the music is telling us he might still have a chance. Fights against all odds are what heroes do, right? So you could imagine “Against All Odds” done without the drum breakdown, and without its singer going all-in at the end – in fact it might be interesting – but that isn’t the route Collins takes, and Mariah Carey follows him closely. Her cover is of a piece with her “Without You”: a power ballad classic faithfully rendered, with a shot of vocal rocket-fuel.

It’s striking, in fact, how little Mariah re-interprets the song: most of the major decisions that sound like they might be hers – the ever-extending melisma on each “now”, her pushing her voice to the point of cracking on the very final chorus, that last drawn-out “take”, and the rather deflationary, resigned ending – are there when Phil Collins sings it. He’s not the powerhouse she is, and he ends up sounding angry where she sounds steely – but hers is a strong, if conservative, version of a fine song.

If only I was writing about it. I sort of am, of course – this collaboration is actually more of a remix, with Mariah Carey’s vocal line edited down and Westlife drafted to fill in the gaps that leaves. They were the bigger UK stars, kicking off the promotion for their second album, and they get to start the record off – but the sleeve doesn’t lie. They are the guest act here. And what a wretched job of it they do.

It’s hard to see how arranging “Against All Odds” as a duet would help it in any circumstances – a song about abjecting yourself for an absent lover doesn’t really need anyone joining in. Let alone these five feckless sods: it’s a big song, but not that big. On the early verses it doesn’t matter too much – the singing is on the oafish side, but they’re not trying to have Mariah’s or Westlife’s bits communicate, so I can’t really fault that they don’t. And the song keeps Mariah’s best moment intact – her sad, soft reading of the first chorus. But when Westlife are drafted in as backing vocals on the final choruses, toes are very much being trodden on. Westlife footle around the edges of Carey’s delivery (”Taaaake…a…loook….”), unwisely try and take her on (”STANDING HERE!”), and settle in the end for just leeching any remaining drama from her vocals (”Chance I gotta take…gotta take”). Making the ending even smarmier – and throwing on one of those ubiquitous glimmering keyboard effects – is just a bonus.

Mariah – or her record company – are just as culpable here: she wanted a hit, this was the path to one. For Westlife, it telegraphed two things: they were big enough to share billing, if not studio time, with a global megastar. And their second album would, if anything, be more conservative than their first. Nobody involved with “Against All Odds” was taking any chances. Except with quality.

“Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” came hard on the heels of “Groovejet” as a revivalist disco hit. It also works as a despondent, pleading answer record: where Sophie Ellis-Bextor embraces the dancefloor as a flirtatious zone of mystery and ambiguity, “Lady” begs for resolution. Lyrically, musically, emotionally, it circles its sampled groove like water circling a drain. Where “Groovejet” is spry, happy to lose itself in the possibility of disco, “Lady” finds a rut and keeps scratching it deeper in its despairing neediness. The singles’ proximity does “Lady” no favours – this suitor, and his simple plea, is run rings round.

What’s interesting for me about the comparison is that “Lady” is outclassed even though it’s classier. Where Spiller’s production was a lucky dip of disco sonics, Modjo cut their cloth from the most impeccable of sources: Chic, specifically late-period soundtrack single “Soup For One”. Soup For One – the film – sounds missable, a Woody Allen-esque rom-com about a single dude’s struggles in 80s NYC. “Soup For One”, the single, condenses anything you might need to know about the topic into five faintly paranoid minutes: it’s worth the salvage. Modjo brighten Nile Rodgers’ riff and refine it further, extracting a tincture of frustration. They pay the sample a sizeable compliment: hearing “Lady”, you imagine it’s from earlier in Chic’s career than it is.

By 2000, that career was a dance music touchstone. In Disco’s heyday, Chic’s British chart presence was consistent, but there was no specific breakthrough. Each incarnation – the irresistibly lean party funk of “Le Freak”, the barbed and brittle social observation of “Good Times”, or the terrible frozen longing of their slow jams – bobbed around in the top ten. Part of the fabric, but not dominant. Instead, this is their moment – the pristine, precise Rodgers/Edwards sound, “glass mountains on fire” as Melody Maker’s Paul Lester once called it, became a shorthand for disco itself. And their sense of economy – disco as a vehicle for intense emotion coolly expressed – was the backbone of the music’s French and international revival.

Which is something Modjo get right. “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” has few ideas, it’s an emotional monochrome, and it comes off worse in an unfair comparison. But it lands a genuine feeling – the awkward anomie of the dancefloor – making it a track I won’t play often but appreciate when I do. Yann Destal’s vocal is an animal chewing its own tail, but there’s some sense of relief in the track’s secret weapon: its springy, Bernard Edwards-esque bassline, which drags “Lady” out of its own soup for one and at least offers the possibility of liberation.

A single that’s good for one thing, at least: “Which group got to No.1 with Take On Me?” is a reliably sneaky pop quiz question. Beyond that, it’s tempting to dismiss A1’s version as irrelevant. Doubly tempting if you were 12 in 1985, and the clean surge of that keyboard riff still sounded like the bright world of life and youth and adventure opening up in front of you. It’s not that a cover version is any kind of sacrilege – just that you can’t update the eternally young. But listen again and A-Ha’s original sounds stuck in its time: the synthesisers thin, the drum sound hollow and deadened. That doesn’t make it less glorious to me, it just reminds me of the work memory does in making songs great. Why not give new 12-year olds a chance for memories of their own?

That’s the logic of the pop micro-genre “Take On Me” reminds me of: not cover versions so much as reboots. Sweden specialised in them: the A-Teens, four perky kids who mixed ABBA numbers with bouncy originals. Or West End Girls, two girls tasked with bringing a teenpop gloss to the Pet Shop Boys. If “Take On Me” wasn’t by A1, you could imagine it as the launch single for A-Half, three jaunty, bright-eyed miniatures of Morton, Mags and Pal. The approach is identical: dusty 80s synths and beats swapped out for slightly clubbier, zippier 90s ones, and a match of proven songs with eye candy for tweens. It was good business, cheerful, and certainly cheap. And – for all you might sniff at it – actually quite hard to really fuck up from a musical perspective.

So yes, A1’s “Take On Me” can’t be the Proustian H-bomb of associations the original is for me – the pop memory is acutely attuned to texture and nuance, the detail of a track, which is why cheap re-recordings, Top Of The Pops Orchestra versions, and covers by “The Original Artists” can be so close and so wrong. But even so it’s still the same song, the same alchemising of a brief fling into a fairytale epic. It has much of the melodic joy, some of the enthusiasm, even a bit of the charm. But it falls down badly on the singing – A1 are anaemic gerbils against Morten Harket’s theatrical falsetto. (And in place of the romance of A-Ha’s landmark video, A1 give us an excruciating cyberpunk riff, which makes no difference to the record but you should see anyway, just because it’s funny.)

Still, their “Take On Me” is a creditable try. No shame on anyone involved. What it doesn’t do is make the case for A1 as anything other than a lower-tier boyband. There was room for a tween-appeal group alongside Westlife’s broader church, and A1 had already notched several hits, but Autumn 2000 was the peak for them. They came with two different marketing angles that didn’t really work together – they had the wholesome cheek of early Take That, and they wrote their own songs. But writing your own songs only matters if you’re good at it, and “Take On Me” was the first memorable record the band put out, even if the memories were all borrowed.

“Her whole career’s been like, oh, they’re the trendy person of the moment, I’ll work with them to make me younger. They’re using you.” – Aphex Twin on Madonna, 2001.

I am the same age now – just turned 42 – as Madonna was when she released “Music”. Last week, with delightful serendipity, Spotify released a study suggesting that listeners hit a “musical mid-life crisis” at 42, as their tastes suddenly skew (a little) back towards the mainstream: are they trying to keep up? Was Madonna? The image of her as trend-chasing, desperate, even “vampiric” (as that Aphex interviewer glossed it) has hardened as the hits dried up. But the Aphex quote shows it was current in the Music era – how he framed the singer’s interest in working with him.

As I said writing up “Frozen”, it’s a bad model for Madonna’s career, designed to diminish her. It’s a particularly poor fit for Mirwais Ahmadazai, her main collaborator across the early 00s. Mirwais was neither trendy – only the most dedicated of French house followers knew much about him – nor young: he was approaching 40 himself when he started working with Madonna. He’s a choice that sheds light on what she was actually up to across the 90s and 00s: she had a sound in mind, and found someone she was comfortable working with to explore that sound and what she could do with it. When she had a different idea, she eased her collaborator out of the deal. As with William Orbit, she valued experience, not youth.

The reference point I used for the Orbit collaboration was James Brown in funk taskmaster mode. But if you’re keen not to flatter Madonna – especially since Mirwais is the only one of Madonna’s sidemen not to shine much outside their work together – there’s another comparison (and contemporary) you might use: Morrissey, who from his mid-30s settled into a steady collaboration with a bunch of rockabilly journeymen. Like Madonna’s partnership with Mirwais, Morrissey’s work with ex-Polecat Boz Boorer et al hovers from steady to dubious, though Madonna’s bolts of genuine inspiration are more frequent.

So what about “Music” itself – the single that opened this phaselet of Madonna’s career? Is it mid-life crisis, determined change of direction, or an artist finding a comfort zone? Bits of all three, maybe. It’s bracing, aggressive even; clattering robot bop and the rawest-sounding electro we’ve met since Flat Eric. “Music” is certainly doing its best to make you think this is a harsher Madonna than the crowd-pleasing swirl of her soundtrack work with Orbit. The first thirty seconds or so past the spoken-word intro are terrific: machines grinding out a lop-sided groove, descending vocoder pleas (”DO YOU LIKE MY ACID ROCK?”) and enter Madonna, cool as you like, from stage left: “Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on…”

After that, though? The alienation doesn’t let up, and Madonna is in no mood for concessions. “Music” works its groove remorselessly, refusing you anything much in the way of melody musically or vocally: this is as Kraftwerkian as she ever got, except Madonna’s robot rock has more grease and grime to it, less beauty. But it’s also too busy, piling up sounds, and some of its tricks are determinedly ugly in ways I can’t appreciate – the overlapping, out-of-phase vocal lines on the chorus, for instance.

The other problem I have is that all the disorientation tactics hide one of Madonna’s most boring, least inviting songs emotionally. Madonna likes music, you see, and most of “Music” is a restatement of that, at length, to the point where it starts feeling – unthinkable for her! – defensive. “Don’t think of yesterday and I don’t look at the clock” – it’s OK, really, we believe you! That monotonous vocal line, and the clank and grind of the backing, make loving music sound awfully hard work, like a really brutal workout regimen. (So maybe my 42-year old self can relate – “Music”’s awkward, gritted-teeth forward momentum does capture what it feels like when the pleasures of youth need more and more effort. But I don’t believe that’s what she was going for.)

The irony is that as a concept for a song, ‘think of yesterday’ sums it up too well. From Chuck Berry to ABBA, the rock era was scattered with songs about music in the abstract, as a force of life-changing or world-changing power. They’re part celebration, part self-justification: “It swept this whole wide land / Rock and roll forever will stand”, as The Showmen put it. That’s the vibe I get from “Music” – and the “bourgeoisie and the rebel” bit does sound great, whatever it actually means. But Madonna herself pushed beyond that a long time ago. “Into The Groove” is better than “Music” not just because it has better hooks but because it feels more lived, more personal, less monolithic – it doesn’t try to switch clumsily from personal testament to grand idea, it has the self-belief to trust that you won’t need that.

“Music” was a statement, and did its job, at the time, of underlining Madonna’s late-90s renewal by confirming that her sound would stay mutable, her ambition remain obvious. This was important: for all the excellence of Ray Of Light, it had the feel of a mature record, the kind of album that caps careers and might herald a gentle fade. “Music” ruled that out. Fifteen years on, it still crunches enough for me to enjoy despite its large flaws. But the only statement this song can make now is its central one – “Music makes the people come together” – and while it’s no less true, it’s no less banal.

The revival of disco within pop put a spotlight on something that had gone missing over the 90s: a sense of music not just for dancing, but for dancing with someone. Disco was a music of mutual attraction: cruising, flirtation, negotiation. Its dancefloor is a space for immediate pleasure, but also for promises kept and otherwise. It’s a place where things start, but their resolution, let alone their meaning, is never clear. All of 2000’s great disco number ones explore how to play this hand. Madison Avenue look to impose their will upon it, to set terms and roles. Spiller is less rigid. “Groovejet” accepts the night’s changeability, happily sells out certainty for an amused smile and a few great one-liners. “Just for one lifetime I can be your pastime”, “In it together till I know you better.” Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s original chorus precisely caught the song’s resigned swoon: “And so it goes… how does it feel so good?”.

“Groovejet” – helped along by a whipped-up chart battle with Posh Spice – felt like the hit of the summer. Victoria Beckham’s song, “Out Of Your Mind”, was nowhere near as bad as some claimed – a surprisingly hard-headed, up to date, UK garage record, drenched in vocal effects. It was as modern and forthright as “Groovejet” was nostalgic and enigmatic. But its different parts grated where Spiller’s meshed. There’s a beautiful tension in “Groovejet”, an apt flirtation between Bextor’s languid, cut-glass vocals and the delightful indulgence of Spiller’s music. It’s not just any disco he’s reviving, after all. No Chic for Spiller, none of that poise or aspirational elegance. The sounds “Groovejet” loots are the syn-drums and ray-gun synths of disco’s overripe peak and decline, when it was corny, wonderful, mass-market pop music: you can hear hints of Kelly Marie or Amii Stewart in the song, before that sweetness falls back into the dreamy groove. “Groovejet” is a fond tour of disco when it ruled the world, and proof that it still could.

The music can be playful because the sophistication all comes from Ellis-Bextor. Her vocals were so appealing on this track she could ditch her indie-band baggage and spin them into a brief, well-loved career as a top ten presence, mixing instant hooks with finishing school froideur just as templated here. She offsets the track’s bubbly repetition, adds a bittersweet note without ever sounding like she’s above it. In fact she sounds carried along by it: Ellis-Bextor’s – and the song’s – most powerful moment is the breakdown – “Will you remember me, boy? Remember me – “ and her voice suddenly spirals up into the backing, the thought lost in the music. It’s blissful. And so it goes… but Rob Davis, who changed the chorus, made the right call, getting to an essence not just of the song, but of disco itself. Never mind absolutes, never mind reality, never mind the world outside the song and your body. Trust to pleasure, you’ll be alright. “If this ain’t love, why does it feel so good?”

What does a Mel C record sound like? Not an easy question. Her solo singles ask more, in terms of brand loyalty, than any other Spice – she was respected for her voice, and the assumption is you’ll want to follow it through flashy Britrock (”Goin’ Down”), acoustic soft pop (”Northern Star”), twilit R&B (”Never Be The Same Again”) and now muscular pop-trance. And that’s without bringing Bryan Adams into it. There’s something very appealing about this hopscotch approach, but almost none of the songs are strong enough to sell Melanie C as more than a dabbler.

“I Turn To You” comes close, though. At least it does in its original version, a much subtler, lusher thing, co-produced by hardcore dance legend Rob Playford, the producer who’d helped briefly make Goldie into a chart star. I hear something of the ache and restraint of “Inner City Life” in the original mix of “I Turn To You”, and I notice how well Mel C is singing it, too. Lyrics that brushed past me on the single mix – just more trancey rent-a-metaphor – seem fresher and more plainly felt on the album.

For whatever reason – too many relatively slow singles? – that original wasn’t the mix she went with. Wikipedia lists an ear-boggling twenty different remixes, edits, dubs and versions of “I Turn To You”: they wanted this track to be a hit, and were aiming squarely for the clubs. Hex Hector does a job on that front – and picked up a Grammy for it – but it squashes and boxes the song into uncomfortably peppy shape. Mel C’s best Spice contributions were backing vocal interventions that whipped up the energy of a song, but she’s not a belter, and her performance here is about exploring feelings, not declaring them. The remix job hides that, and makes the song more anonymous. The reference point at the time – thanks partly to the video – was Madonna’s “Ray Of Light”, and that gale force chorus proclamation is probably what the remixed “I Turn To You” needs. But what it actually sounds like is a much more recent hit – Sonique’s mellow, grown-up euphoria on “It Feels So Good”. Echoing one of the year’s top sellers is a sensible move, it confirms Melanie C’s admirable range, but like her other records, it doesn’t make a case for her as a star you might care about beyond the flush of post-Spice goodwill.

Back at “Millennium” I claimed that Robbie Williams’ wild success, his undeniable – and untranslatable – appeal as a pop star, said something wider about turn of the century British culture; that Robbie fitted into a post-Blair, post-Diana era where Britain felt at ease with itself and curious about itself, happy to celebrate the everyday, and to let someone become the country’s biggest star on little but determination and cheek.

Robbie was only the beginning: the early 00s saw a steady demystifying of celebrity matched by an equally steady supply of the newly famous. “Rock DJ” landed at number one near the beginning of this process – during the first series of Big Brother, still very much at this point a ‘psychological experiment’ in national voyeurism, Britain taking an unblinking, intimate look at ten of its own. Life Thru A Lens, if you like. If Robbie Williams was an expert on anything, it was being famous, and he understood every side of such attention. The video for “Rock DJ” cast him as a dancer, desperate to be noticed, stripping off clothes, then skin, muscle and organ.

So the media approach to pop success I talked about in the “7 Days” entry – knowing, snarky, treating it as a joke as much as a story – was only part of this broader 00s re0evaluation about what celebrity and fame meant. It was toxic for some stars. But it suited Robbie very well. He could make records where the sneer came baked in. “Rock DJ” acts as if it’s a bubble of charismatic nonsense, a song about almost nothing, but I’m hearing something corrosive about it too, a spitefulness that Robbie never commits to but can’t or won’t entirely shake off.

More than any of his other singles, “Rock DJ” comes on as Robbie just giving his public ‘Robbie’ – the worldly, applause-hungry jester. The eagerness to please a rock crowd that would never quite accept him has long gone, and instead we have the full-on engagement with rap that “Millennium” had gestured towards. But it’s an engagement completely on Robbie’s own terms. Williams’ approach to rapping is actually very like J from Five’s – collect a bunch of lines that sound cool and throw them at a track blindfold – but he’s got far more presence. He also has a good trick of dropping a snatch or two of vernacular in – “have a proper giggle”, “gonna stick it in the goal” – that helps him get away with his borrowed Americanisms and places him in a lineage of British rapping bluffers that goes back to Captain Sensible’s “Wot”.

But it’s remarkable how much of “Rock DJ” is just getting by on Robbie’s energy and charisma, and he’s well aware of that. He delivers lines like “Babylon back in business / Can I get a witness?” like they’re part of an anthem, then snaps back to a cruel deadpan: “You got no love and you’re with the wrong man / It’s time to move your body.” All of it has a caustic, Lennon-ish joy in simply moving words around and a childish glee at the very presence of an audience and the chance to perform for them.

That’s the upbeat side, and it’s easy to focus on because Guy Chambers’ springy backing track has such brio. “Rock DJ” is a brightly coloured play area of a song, designed as a chance for Robbie to strut, to work a crowd and a stage (live performances make the most of the track’s call and response opportunities). But while it does that job, Williams’ relationship with the spotlight has never been quite so simple. Mostly he’s rousing on “Rock DJ”, but sometimes he sounds offhand and callous, and the chirpy backing vocals only enhance the sense that this is a deliberately glib exercise. During the breakdown, on “if you’re selling it, it’s alright”, Williams’ voice slides into contempt.

Contempt for us? For himself? It’s hard to say. There’s an ambivalence to “Rock DJ”, a sense of a party, like the video striptease, that’s going on too long. “I don’t wanna rock, DJ… When’s it gonna stop, DJ?” As with “Millennium”’s sudden turn in on itself in its coda, “Rock DJ” is a smash hit with a buried case of impostor syndrome. It’s easy to make too much of this – the song works fine if you hear it as no more than a star vehicle – but as is often the case with Robbie Williams, it’s that streak of restless scorn that makes it interesting to me.

When Craig David’s manager heard the chorus of “7 Days” for the first time, he knew at once the 17 year old would be a star. The song made him. It also doomed him. “7 Days” is the most immediate single of the year, and also the easiest to parody. A committed, self-serious lad, David chafed at the attention of comedians, particularly Bo Selecta!’s Leigh Francis, whose consistent, surreal use of the singer was blamed by David for sabotaging his career. But “7 Days” is so ridiculous – and so catchy – that it attracted piss-takers like piranha to steak. That doesn’t make David’s hurt and regret less real, or void his case – the relationship between pop music and the rest of British culture, comedy included, was on the turn. But it doesn’t make “7 Days” less funny.

Perhaps I’m taking too much for granted, here. Surely some people listen to “7 Days” and hear the soulful, seductive record Craig David intended it to be. I find that easy to believe, but also hard to imagine, so I’ll try and unpick why it doesn’t work as that for me, even though it feels like explaining a joke. The central problem is that the chorus – and the title – sets itself up as a classic days-of-the-week riff, and then blows it, folding the last few days into “making love”. That’s poetically unsatisfying, and also turns “chilled on Sunday” into a punchline. Worse, the rapid cadence of “and on Thursday, Friday and Saturday” concertinas the making love section, making it seem rushed. The image that comes to mind isn’t four days spent in the sensuous reverie implied by the delicate arrangement and David’s cooing voice, but four days of rapid, trousers-round-the-ankles banging. Accurate enough, no doubt – we’re talking about an 18 year old here – but sophisticated? Not really.

Things get worse when you listen to the verses (which, to be fair, I suspect almost nobody did). On “Fill Me In”, David’s eye for the specific turned the risky fumblings of teenage lust into something evocative and dramatic. On “7 Days”, the detail is weirdly misapplied. The woman Craig falls for is completely anonymous – “a beautiful honey with a beautiful body” – yet it’s important to note that they met at “quarter past three” and she gave him a “six digit number”. The clever touch of having the rest of the verse framed as David bragging to his friends sets up the tantalising idea that the narrator could just be making all this stuff up – but the song doesn’t follow up, instead detailing the date and seduction at length, but never in detail. In the end the mates’ incredulous question – “Was it for real?” is the most credible moment. The whole thing sounds like what it is – a wannabe Casanova’s juvenilia, a seduction narrative written by a barely experienced kid.

There’s no harm in that – teenage boys brag, and dream of having things to brag about. In its way, “7 Days” is as authentic as “Fill Me In”, except it’s a product of awkwardness, not a song about it. And whether intentionally or not, “7 Days” is as funny as it is immediate and prettily executed. Heard a song on Monday, sang it in the pub on Tuesday, made our own one up by Wednesday… and so on. But where do you go after it? Once “7 Days” is loose in the world, can Craig David be taken seriously? Or as seriously as he wants to be, at any rate.

Leigh Francis thought not, and saw in Craig David’s earnest but callow self-presentation the perfect star to serve as the bizarre centre of his show. Compared to some celebrities, David got off lightly from Bo Selecta! – he was ubiquitous, but Francis doesn’t seem as hostile to him as he was to people like Mel B or Jordan. Francis has dismissed David’s claims of career-wrecking, pointing out that the singer’s star was on the wane before Bo Selecta! launched. And the sheaf of top ten hits David did score across the rest of the 00s show a man with a very limited range – the delicate soul-pop of his first two solo hits seems the beginning and end of his abilities, and as the UK garage element ebbed out of the music, most of the interest went with it. Would he have shown more ambition without the mockery? It’s impossible to say.

Ultimately, the signficance of Bo Selecta! isn’t really in its effect on any individual career. It was the attitude to pop music and culture that was new. The rise of alternative comedy intertwined with the rise of post-punk and indie music. In the 80s, alternative comedians found allies in some areas of pop – Madness and Dexy’s showed up on the Young Ones – and largely ignored the rest. Spitting Image touched on the most obvious targets but mostly had loftier ambitions. In the 90s, comedians and Britpoppers shared a constituency, and often a stage – Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff, Keith Allen and Blur, Baddiel and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds. They mounted a cultural takeover together – and then, suddenly, the pop end of the deal collapsed. Leigh Francis’ generation of comedians found themselves in a pop landscape where the music they felt most affinity for had fallen from grace, replaced with something that seemed the most obvious of targets. “I’m sick of you little girl and boy groups, all you do is annoy me…”

And so the minutiae, and the personalities, of pop culture found themselves in the crosshairs of comedy in a way they hadn’t been in twenty years, if ever. Bo Selecta!, and other shows stuffed with cultural detail and references, work on familiarity with, as well as contempt for, pop culture – a student viewer knew who newly famous pop stars like Craig David were, in a way that the adult viewer of a 60s or 70s impressionist might not have done. And the interesting thing is that this easy superiority became a default tone of British music coverage itself: Miquita Oliver and Simon Amstell’s enjoyably world-weary approach as presenters on Channel 4’s Popworld was immensely influential, giving broadcast media a snide wit the UK music press had always employed.

Mockery was an inevitable development given a pop world where access to the truly global megastars was so tightly controlled, and local musicians were hardly likely to retain much mystique when they increasingly came from the same university or drama school backgrounds as presenters. Sometimes you got the feeling those presenters and comedians – and later, the bloggers and broadsheet columnists – loved pop, in all its foolishness. Sometimes you got the feeling they despised it, or felt it had lost some invisible legitimacy after Britpop failed. Whichever it was made little difference to the outcome – snark reigned.

Was that a bad thing? It depended entirely on the targets. Reverence would have been the wrong reaction to the world of “7 Days” and Five + Queen. But the new atmosphere would suit some stars more than others, and Craig David – a serious young man who sung a silly song – choked in it.

2014 saw Queen reach an unfortunate milestone – they’ve now been going for longer without Freddie Mercury than with him. It’s been an odd 23 years. John Deacon bowed out with some dignity in 1997, but Brian May and Roger Taylor remain remorselessly active. Sometimes their stewardship has been a great public success – pioneering the jukebox musical, for instance – and sometimes it’s felt more like the most dogged but pointless of May’s many hobbies. This single, their only No.1 since the initial post-Freddie tribute era, surely falls into the former category. But hold on – the official Queen website has no mention of it. Nor does the band’s quite thorough Wikipedia history. What’s up?

A listen to “We Will Rock You” dispels any mystery. This is very much the sort of single you hope slips discreetly out of your discography. You could say it’s the band’s – and our – bad luck that it exists in the first place, since the record seems to rest on several terrible misconceptions, any of which should have been enough for one of Queen’s advisors to veto Five from doing it. The idea, for instance, that “We Will Rock You” would carry more weight with its empty spaces filled by rapping. The idea that J from Five was the MC to do this job. And the idea that his band should drop their endearing goofball act and talk tough, matching the record’s aggression blow for blow.

Being charitable, you can see a point here. The kind of old school hip-hop flow J adopts is a sort-of cousin to the boot-boy chanting of “We Will Rock You”’s verses. And some of the rap he evokes rests on similarly primal beats – the Disco Four even had a song called “Stomp, Stomp, Clap” and plenty of hip-hop has sampled or evoked the song. But let’s not be too generous: this record is a shambles, and the best explanation for J’s style isn’t a deliberate retro move but a man whose idea of rapping and its content is showing off to mates in a Year 6 lunch break. His enthusiasm – often the saving grace of Five’s clumsy, likeable pop – turns deluded here as he and his group adopt a ludicrous swagger. “Watch your back / We got Queen on this track!”

To which the only response – rubbernecking aside – is “why?”. “We Will Rock You” is an odd fish even within Queen’s varied and wayward catalogue. The track’s mass adoption by professional sport has completely eaten its context, leaving something that’s less a song than a rite, a kind of off-the-peg haka. Covering it catapults Five into a world of sweat and testosterone they’re too callow for. The gurning, desperate face of Ritchie Nevile on the sleeve is a summary of the whole foolish endeavour (and this review).

It’s tempting to look beyond the band, and identify the dread hand of Cowell in all this: in the X-Factor world,. “We Will Rock You” is no better quality, but a rather better fit. It’s the kind of farrago that no-hopers in ‘the groups’ might trot out for ‘Queen Week’ before the public tires of them. The natural fate of this is three minutes of hooting, pointing and tweeting on a Saturday night. In that sense alone, “We Will Rock You” is a single ahead of its time.

Fishing for critical angles in songwriting credits is a mostly futile endeavour. You soon learn the sad truth: the distribution of talent and memorable style is as skewed among writers as among everyone else – including the stars and hopefuls they work for. Consistency – never mind individuality – is a rare gift. More likely the trawl through Discogs and Wikipedia reveals the half-forgotten boyband hit as the peak of some toiler’s career. But every so often a partnership between star and writer works, and sometimes in surprising ways. This is the only number one Gregg Alexander – ex New Radicals – wrote for Ronan, but he was heavily involved with every one of the singer’s early solo LPs. And listening to “Life Is A Rollercoaster” it’s easy to hear why. Alexander solved a real problem for Keating: how to make the Irish boyband style work for upbeat songs.

The Boyzone, Westlife and Keating style has up to now been a placid thing – given, at least on paper, to great agonies of the soul, but not blessed with much pep. Standard boyband approaches to uptempo numbers at this point in time didn’t suit those groups. The Cheiron ballad style worked fine, but Backstreet-style scando-pop was too pneumatic, and sounded too young for the wider audience Ronan is after. The other option – pop with a dash of hip-hop, a la Five – seemed far too radical for the Louis Walsh stable (on this occasion, his instincts were surely right).

Gregg Alexander offered a different route. “You Get What You Give” had been a massive hit because its yelping optimism sounded so fresh and unreserved, but its musical roots were a remembrance of the clean, MOR sound of 70s and 80s radio pop. The alt-baiting lyrics – “Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson / You’re all fakes run to your mansions” – underlined Alexander’s reactionary zeal, his desire to present himself as an idealistic new broom ready to spring-clean a cynical, dead-end decade. Marketers would come to brand that kind of earnest enthusiasm as “millennial”, though Alexander himself was well-heeled: his showy contempt for fakery born out of a scrappy career as much as idealism. Having proved his point with a smash, he quit in short order to write for others.

“Life Is A Rollercoaster” – apparently meant for a second New Radicals LP – is a product of that, cut from the same cheerful cloth as “You Get What You Give”. Alexander had no snobbery when it came to picking who to write for, happily bedding down with popular but unfashionable acts – as well as Keating, he wrote hits for Geri Halliwell and Texas. His style is as identifiable on this as Mutt Lange’s was on “Breathless”, and a comfort to the same broad audience: woo-woo backing vocals, a rousing chorus, and a general sense that the world and its challenges can and will be overcome by anyone spirited enough. Despite some strong early hits, Alexander’s star as a professional songwriter fell as the decade continued: for no definite reason, but maybe the world changed enough that his sunshine touch lost its appeal.

Meanwhile “Rollercoaster” is comfortably the best song Ronan’s been involved in, though he lands a little out of his depth. He’s too solid a fellow for the devil-may-care bravado of the record’s most memorable lyric, “Hey Sugar / You almost got us punched in a fight”, he falters and ends up flagging, not vaulting, the line’s slight clumsiness. His performance blunts the record, replacing any bluster with a slight stodginess. Life may well be a rollercoaster, but it’s quite a mild one and you’d certainly feel comfortable letting the kids on.

We’re halfway through 2000’s overstuffed curiosity shop of number ones, and I’ve realised something about this period’s glut of hits. The common idea is that the rapid turnover at the top is the sign of a chart that’s broken, over-responsive to release date and first-week sales manipulation. But actually writing about them has brought home how many different groups and scenelets were being served by the charts – from the Manics to Gabrielle, Britney to Eminem, Madison Avenue to Oxide & Neutrino. There’s something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. This is the music industry at its bloated commercial peak, the greatest expansion of the CD bubble – of course a sales-based chart is going to reflect that. So 2000’s number ones now feel to me not like a garden in need of weeding, but an unnaturally fecund vegetable patch, pumped full of dodgy fertiliser.

Alongside the prize-winning specimens, less remarkable growths still thrive. The audience for “Breathless” surely overlapped with Gabrielle and even Sonique, though this is more AOR than either. The Mutt Lange credit offers another clue – this is pitching to the same, vast, constituency that bought Shania’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much”. Glossy, friendly, pop-rock, vast and spotless but with a relatable folksiness brought in via the artist’s root genre. For Twain, it was country music’s down-to-earth humour providing the human touch; for the Corrs, it’s the wholesomeness of sisterly harmonising (and a dab of tin whistle, unless I’m hallucinating). Though after Simple Minds, after Celine, after B*Witched, the Corrs deserve points for using Irish folk touches as just another part of a big pop song, not as off-the-shelf Celtic flavouring. “Breathless” is never not corny, but for the most part it’s a sturdy, midwestern strain of corn.

It’s also obviously accomplished. Lange’s knowhow and production muscle make it soar and stop in the right places, and Andrea Corr’s soft voice is a sweet counterpoint to the jacked-up backing. There was a large constituency who didn’t care about either the “little girl and boy groups” or their bleach-blond nemesis, who just wanted music to be songful, well-made and direct – and the understated bliss of “Breathless” is certainly that. In a pop scene made up of so many niches, some things just pass you by entirely, and I only knew the “beautiful, beautiful Corrs” as the butt of a regular joke on kids’ variety and pop show SMTV. On this evidence, they deserved more. Not that much more, though. It’s good to hear the open, optimistic Lange sound again, but his best work – the chrome-plated rock fantasies of Def Leppard, or Shania’s winning snark – has a bite and momentum that The Corrs were never likely to hit.